This invention is in the field of crop drying apparatus.
Many field crops, when harvested, are too moist for storage or handling in bulk for further processing. This is particularly true of peanuts.
A conventional manner of drying harvested peanuts is to place them in burlap sacks and stack or stand the sacks in the field for drying by ambient air. However, such a method has many drawbacks including the necessity of manually handling the sacks and rearranging them in the event of rain. In addition, the sacks are on what may be moist or wet ground and drying by this method may taken as much as nine days. Also, the frequent handling of the sacks results in splits and damage to the product.
Another method now widely used is to transport the peanuts to a drying facility where heated air is forced through a bulk body of the product. Such a method involves bulk transport of the moist crop, which often results in their overheating. Such a method is also expensive and conventionally uses gas to heat the air, thus further depleting the available supply of fuel gas.
The patents to Harris U.S. Pat. No. 3,417,487 and Moore U.S. Pat. No. 3,626,601 show representative devices used in forced air drying. Each patent shows a container for holding the product in a bulk body and means for forcibly directing heated air through the body, either from an inner air distributor or from a manifold below the body. In each patent, the body is held in a container or bin having solid side walls.